Warner Bros Releases First Trailer For Wonka

Some story elements are best left a mystery. Willy Wonka is one of the great enigmatic characters of literature and cinema. He feels like he comes from another world; his actions and trippy empire he seems to have self-built are unexplained, but they don’t need any explanation. It’s too bad we’re getting one anyway.

Warner Bros has been trying for a long time to get a prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, simply called Wonka, off the ground. A spec script was leaked years ago and is generally regarded as terrible. It was a very old script, though, and the trailer WB put out this morning doesn’t appear to be based on it.

Wonka, here, is a young man played by Timothee Chalamet with a top hat full of dreams. He wants to be a candy maker, but the candy market is controlled by a tightly knit cabal of conglomerates who squash all outsiders. But Wonka’s…shall we say, exotic recipes give him a leg up on the competition (as does a secret race of orange elves).

I’m reminded a lot here of Oz: The Great And Powerful, the prequel to The Wizard Of Oz Disney put out last decade. The movie’s okay, but was the overall story of Oz incomplete if we didn’t know what the Wizard’s deal was? Is there a real reason for it to exist beyond money? Not really.

There’s reason to hope that Wonka won’t be a complete stinker. The director of Paddington is handling it, and the film is a musical, much like the 1971 original. But Willy’s notorious Dahl-brand dark streak (“maybe that kid blew up, maybe he didn’t, let’s move on”) does not appear to be a part of his younger self. I miss it.

Wonka will be released December 15.